Helpful family tree (color-coded by “race”) to grasp the twists and turns of the Sutpen extended family.
source: Volpe, Edmond Loris. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner,. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Print.
AA! genealogy
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Unsettling Masks
Faulkner plays with the concept of hiding – particularly part of one’s face by having something, whether it be Sutpen’s beard or powder on Ellen’s face to mask how that character is feeling.
On the day of Ellen’s wedding to Sutpen, Ellen wore 2 masks. The first when her face was made up with powder, “the aunt had even forced or nagged [not cajoled: that would not have done it] Mr. Coldfield into allowing Ellen to wear powder on her face for the occasion. The powder was to hide the marks of tears. But before the wedding was over the powder was streaked again, caked and channelled” [AA, 37]. The streaked, caked, and channelled face was the mask of the newly minted Mrs. Ellen Sutpen [nee Coldfield]. That second mask would come to represent Ellen’s life as a married woman. All of Yonknapatawpha County, Ellen’s spinster aunt, Mr. Coldfield, and perhaps even Ellen herself realized that a union between she and Sutpen served only to hide Sutpen behind the cloak of respectability.
When Sutpen first came to Yoknapatawpha County, his “short reddish beard was thought to resemble a disguise” [AA 24], and when he returned to Yoknapatawpha a third time, with all manner of fine goods with him and the townsfolk that wanted to arrest him were unsure what to do with him, it was partly because of Sutpen’s beard that increased their uneasiness. “It might have been a good thing that he had that beard and they could not see his mouth…it was in his face; that was where his [Sutpen’s] power lay…anyone could look at him and say Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything” [AA 34-35]. Sutpen’s eyes were hard and depending on who you were and what Sutpen was up to, he could look at someone with contempt in his eyes and the receiver of such a look may not understand why he is receiving such a look, but Sutpen’s mouth could have betrayed him. His mouth could have counteracted whatever hardness his eyes conveyed, or his mouth could have indicated some sort of welcome or inquiry. The reddish beard was off-putting; it helped strengthen the mystery surrounding Sutpen, because observers could not tell what his mouth, like the rest of Sutpen was thinking.
In chapter 3, Mr. Compson tells Quentin of Ms. Rosa and how she was trained by the same spinster aunt [who had been both mother and father to Ellen and later, Rosa] to view Sutpen with that “blind irrational fury of a shedding snake and who had come to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard’s and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world…” [AA 47]. This is what became of Ellen’s caked, streaked, and channelled mask of years ago.
A Few Scattered Thoughts on Absalom’s First 3 Chapters
10 pages into Absalom I put the book down for a second on my lap and said, “My God, WHAT is going on in this novel?” Where is the Faulkner I’m used to? TSAF, AILD, and LIA had such bold voices. We got to know each character from the inside. We lived and breathed them, we became them. I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on any of these characters just yet. I know the peripherals, the reputations, the hear-say that goes drifting through family lore and town gossip like tumbleweeds on a dirt road. But I haven’t been put inside them yet, like Benjy or Jason or Darl or Dewey Dell. Even Quentin, whose mind once dazzled and disturbed, now feels distant. But alas, as I’ve come to learn, there is little clarity at the forefront of a Faulkner novel, and much more at the end. The fog has rolled in, and I suspect it will dissolve over the second half of the novel.
It is the telling of a telling of a story, told by Miss Coldfield and Mr. Compson to Quentin, who in turn will tell the story to his Harvard roommate (whom we’ve already met in TSAF) Shreve. With Faulkner there is an on-going trope of characters passing on stories, usually with a sense of urgency, which is appropriate since this was Faulkner’s main artistic achievement: “So they had to depend on inquiry to find out what they could about him.” (25) It’s important to correlate the travel and movement of characters (as discussed by Leigh Anne Duck in her essay) with the travel and movement of stories. The two are necessarily intertwined. So the “legend” of Sutpen and his “wild negroes” is a kind of stage drama witnessed by the town’s men and brought back to the others in the form of lore: “So the legend of the wild men came gradually back to town, brought by the men who would ride out to watch what was going on…” (27)
I loved Andrew’s reading of the connection between the French architect and Faulkner’s own role as writer, the two artistic tasks overlapping in the elements of structure, design, and function: a story, once it is told, being a kind of interior house for one to live in. The parallel is applicable on many levels. If we look at Hemingway’s grand metaphor for writing as being a long, exhausting battle with a fish, ultimately eradicated materially yet triumphant spiritually, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Sutpen’s Hundred and his mansion. It is noteworthy that if the French architect is a parallel for Faulkner’s own artistic endeavor, he is a character whose only agency comes with creative input, but who has been basically forced to undergo the erection of Sutpen’s relentless vision. This might suggest that Faulkner had an idea of himself as a kind of slave to his own artistry.
I’m also seeing strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in the structure of a novel being a story entirely told by a medial character who stands between author and us as readers; in the complex romantic triangulation involving family members; in the incestuous undertones of siblings; in the house as an enclosed space where psychological dramas and family violence is acted out; and in the traditional Gothic theme of ghosts: “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still…” (4)
